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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29435040">meta - Philippa Georgiou &amp; Jim Kirk</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/m_class/pseuds/m_class'>m_class</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: The Original Series</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Captain Georgiou January - February, Gen, Hijinks, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Meta, Starfleet captains as middle management, Starfleet-life balance, Taking a Third Option, Tarsus IV, Trauma, archiving this for</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 16:40:16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,406</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29435040</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/m_class/pseuds/m_class</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Some thoughts on Georgiou and Kirk's similarities, their meeting in novel canon, and what they might be like working together.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Philippa Georgiou &amp; James T. Kirk</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>meta - Philippa Georgiou &amp; Jim Kirk</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Orig. posted to Tumblr<br/>December 2020</p><p>Archiving this in honor of Captain Georgiou January - February...today is the penultimate day of this event if you're interested in participating! (<a href="https://wearecaptaingeorgiou.tumblr.com/">Tumblr</a>/<a href="https://twitter.com/werecptgeorgiou">Twitter</a>) Accepting all fanwork types except fic and its close equivalents. (We'll also totally accept/boost stuff after the event is over, and the fanbook will still be accepting submissions for a while yet, but in the spirit of being festive for the event itself I'm doing some last-minute hyping. ;)</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Out of all the Star Trek captains, I think Georgiou and Kirk are not only one of the duos who are most similar to each other, but also one of the duos who would work best together should the opportunity arise. (For example, Janeway and Sisko, Freeman and Picard, or Pike and Janeway could all also be compared as relatively similar to each other, but would any of those duos work well together? Maybe Freeman and Picard on a good day, but as for the others…hm.)</p><p>As <a href="https://starfleetdoesntfirefirst.tumblr.com/post/636043704620154880/static-warp-bubble-star-trek-discovery-the">this post</a> points out, Georgiou’s [“What will you do if we’re trapped here for eighty-nine years?”] “That’s easy, I’d escape” line has an extremely Kirk energy. The two of them share a take-a-third-option ethos and a mischievous sense of resourcefulness, and for both of them, this is implied to come from a place of past trauma. Kirk survived the massacre at Tarsus IV, where Kodos called it “necessary” to kill many people to “solve” a crisis; at the Academy, he hacked the Kobayashi Maru out of a refusal to accept being told “sometimes losses are inevitable.” For her part, Georgiou had “seen a life of loss, but still chose hope.” She is someone who has experienced enough personal tragedy that she herself, despite her generally upbeat personality, bluntly characterizes her own whole life as being “a life of loss.” But she chooses to find hope in her commitment to and love for the people and universe around her. Kirk and Georgiou are both people forged in tragedy who have made it their ethos to refuse to allow the propagation of tragedy. And, of course, they’re also both people who, when push comes to shove and they <em>are</em> faced with unwinnable scenarios, choose to risk themselves before others.</p><p>When it comes to the two of them meeting, we can talk either within the timeline, with Georgiou as an older, experienced officer while Kirk is at the Academy and beginning his career, or via time travel, for a scenario where TOS-era Kirk meets DSC-era Georgiou in classic crossover fashion.</p><p>Of course, a post about the within-the-timeline option is not complete without mention of the time the two of them <em>do</em> meet in novel canon. In the Lorca and Georgiou DSC prequel novel Drastic Measures, fortysomething then-Commander Georgiou leads the team of Starfleet and civilians responding to the famine at Tarsus IV, arriving not long after the massacre, while then-Commander Lorca is stationed at a Tarsus IV Starfleet outpost; Georgiou briefly meets Winona and early-teens Jim Kirk during her time there.</p><p>If you’re thinking “that sounds like a great book,” it is unfortunately mostly iffy-going-on-bad, with moments of being truly bad and moments of being good or genuinely awesome. Philippa and “Jimmy”’s meeting is, IMO, one of the meh bits—Philippa is at Tarsus IV’s hospital, hears a commotion, and discovers that a young teenager visiting his injured friend was caught by a member of the staff trying to hack into the computer system. Winona jogs down the hall toward them shortly thereafter, Philippa tells the other staff who have gathered that she can handle it, and Jim explains that he’s trying to obtain a photo of Kodos to help with the manhunt for him. The three of them then go into his friend’s hospital room and Jim pulls up the photo.</p><p>Nothing too remarkable happens during the scene except that a) the author really wants us to know that teenage Jim is extremely brave and smart and noble, b) there’s a moment where Philippa thinks <em>Wow, this kid would make a GREAT Starfleet officer someday, </em>which admittedly makes sense for the author to have written and is even kind of sweet in out-of-universe context, even if it’s a little eye-rolly for this to supposedly be her reaction in-universe, and c) there’s an actually-poignant moment between the two of them where he tells her about how he saved his injured friend and she tells him that what he did took “a hell of a lot of courage.”</p><p>Outside of novel canon, the most likely way for the two of them to meet in a timeline-consistent way (aside from keeping the scenario in which Georgiou and Lorca are at Tarsus IV; ask me about my dream of some Georgiou &amp; Lorca &amp; Kirk fans getting together to write a fanfic that is this book but good) would probably be for him to meet her when he’s at the Academy or a young ensign; based on the timeline, there would be a two or three year span of time before Georgiou’s death in which the two of them might meet while both are active-duty. This <a href="https://starfleetdoesntfirefirst.tumblr.com/post/637510089890217984/kirktober-8-with-the-character-you-most-want-him">adorable art</a> by <a href="https://warpfactornonsense.tumblr.com/">warpfactornonsense</a> is basically what I picture for that meeting now—Kirk starry-eyed at meeting one of Starfleet’s most decorated and generally badass captains (his little “she’s so cool she’s so cool she’s so cool” internal monologue in the drawing gets me every time I see it since hello, that would be all of our reactions if we were baby Starfleet officers meeting ~Captain Philippa Georgiou~, let’s not lie to ourselves here). As for Georgiou, I think she would see a lot of herself in him, which would result in both kindness and High Standards TimeTM.</p><p>Fortunately, Georgiou is one of the rare adults in the galaxy who could pull off having Very High Standards for a younger adult in a way that doesn’t turn into a <em>complete </em>clusterfuck. Partially, I think that, similar to Picard, she’d be pretty literal about having the same standards for others that she does for herself; rather than demanding the impossible, she just expects her crew and fellow officers to hold themselves to a similar bar that she does for herself, adjusted for age/experience. She also <a href="https://onaperduamedee.tumblr.com/post/187601437888/captain-im-detecting-a-voluntary-antimatter">doesn’t seem to glorify or expect self-sacrifice</a>, which, together with her relaxed attitude in the captain’s chair in the absence of crisis, and the magnitude of her career success as a captain, hints that her standards for herself as well as others are not as punitive as, say, Janeway’s standards for herself, and suggests someone who more or less knows how to take care of herself and take a break. Timeline-wise, when they meet Kirk is likely to be the intense “stack of books on legs” that he apparently was as Academy instructor a few years later; I can imagine that when they meet, part of what Georgiou tries to impart to him is the importance of resting and having some fun.</p><p>(…and now I’m imagining a scenario where she’s explaining to him how amusing it is to set your senior officers bickering with each other, and he’s nodding and taking copious mental notes.)</p><p>But my biggest question is—what about a time-travel scenario that leads to the Kirk we think of as “Kirk” when it comes to Trek captain comparisons—TOS Era Kirk—working with DSC Era Georgiou? With each of them in their full classic Trek captain glory, how would they get along and what would they be like around each other?</p><p>Along with each of their compassion and resourcefulness, a lot of both of their characterizations are about finding a center point between competing pulls. (I’m refusing to use the phrase “finding a balance” because that seems to imply both of them being more calm and less feral than they in fact are). Kirk’s whole thing is that he’s the middle point between McCoy’s “heart” and Spock’s “head.” Georgiou is visibly balancing her principles and her compassion against her temper, her morally-grey traits, and her inner Mirror Georgiou/crossing the line into acting like a complete asshole. And both of them, more than many of the other Trek captains, inhabit that quintessential Starfleet Captain middle-management role of balancing the orders of the admiralty against the needs of their crews and the needs of the people around them.</p><p>I think that their shared professionalism, skill at working with others, and skill at addressing everything going on around them would make it particularly easy and gratifying for the two of them to begin to work together, and that their regard for each other would only deepen as they got to know each other’s similar commitment to ethical conduct and similar intense commitment to saving and protecting as many people as they can. They would respect each other, rely on each other, and take particular delight in trying to make each other laugh, too.</p>
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